Meditation
by mari4212
Summary: ...one of those almost hypnotic businesses...there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation...that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread. - M. F. K. Fisher


Water, a judicious splash of it at first, to give the rest of the ingredients a space to work and blend together. Skin warm, too hot and she knew it would kill the yeast, too cold and the bread would rise too slowly.

Oil next, the droplets floating atop the water's skin. Food for the yeast, and a hint of moisture for the final dough. She didn't measure this part anymore, years of experience giving her a sharp eye and an instinct for how much she needed. Measurements distracted her, pulled her away and made her start thinking again, and Ziva did not wish to think at this moment.

The yeast then, as much as fit into the cup of her hand twice over, and now she could start the battered old mixer, now with something that needed to fold together. The sound filled the room, pushing out the silence she'd been ignoring, much like the scent of the yeast blocked out the stale odor of rooms left empty for long hours, a smell that she could never erase from her home when she wasn't working in the kitchen.

The yeast dissolved quickly into the liquid, turning a milky beige like water in a sandy creek. She poured in a sweet dollop of honey, flavor for the bread and more food for the yeast, giving it a space to work.

Now flour, a heaping scoop shaken into the swirl of oil and water, slowing the vortex slightly as the liquid thickened. She added in two more scoops, then set aside the flour for a moment. She would add more soon, until the dough stiffened and pulled from the sides of the mixing bowl, but first the salt must come.

Salt which would inevitably kill the yeast, but slowly, slowly, not until it had accomplished its purpose. Not until it had grown the bread. She marveled at the irony at times, nourishing the yeast only to destroy it when it was no longer needed. But today she would not think on it. Today she would not let her cynicism make bitter her source of comfort.

Once the salt was in, she continued with more flour, losing track of the number of scoops as she concentrated on the look of the dough, its texture, the speed at which the mixer moved through it. Try though she might, she could not completely shut her mind away from its thoughts, and events of the previous day replayed themselves.

On most days, the arguments with Tony were a comfortable routine for the both of them, a distraction from the endless masses of paper that filled their desks overflowing during the week. She typically thought of them as the necessary touch of spice, like when she'd toss in a pinch of hot pepper into her soup to give the flavor more body. But sometimes they would both be set on edge, and they would turn from bantering debates on the insanity of American English's incessant metaphors to more treacherous ground. Then the words would turn from comfort to weapons, and both of them had spent too long fighting dirty to avoid making the low blows, to avoid striking at each other's bone-deep bruises and never-healed scars.

Yesterday had been one of those days, and words had flown far in the heat of anger. Too far for her, as she had been the one to strike hardest first, and had gotten the last blow in before they had been interrupted again by the case.

Now. Now as the dough pulled away from the sides, balling in the center of the bowl. The mixer's whirring whine changed pitch, rising a note up as the dough hooks ceased to cut through the mass efficiently. Ziva shut off the mixer, tapping at the dough as soon as the hooks had stopped their turning. It was still just slightly too sticky to the touch, the consistency not quite right. The last few scoops of flour would have to be kneaded in by hand, as always.

She cleared a space on the battered wood of the table, and shook out a circle of flour to place the dough in. Scraping the balled bread dough out of the bowl was the work of a minute, and when the dough was sitting upon the floured surface, she shook out another scoop of flour over top of it and began kneading.

Grasping and folding the dough freed her mind to think again, as working with her hands always did, and she found her thoughts returning again to the argument with Tony. She lost track of it sometimes, when they were playing their normal games of one-upmanship with each other, that Tony had as many vulnerable points as she herself did. But where she hid everything behind a straightforward wall, letting few in to see her inner core, Tony was more likely to deflect, to tell a joke or a half-truth, never letting on that anything else was in him. She knew just enough to not be fooled by his normal disguises, just enough to occasionally thrust in between his facades and defenses to get to the real man at the center. But she did not know enough to pull her blows when she hit too deep.

The dough pulled her attention back to the present again, as the feel in her hands shifted suddenly from not right to done, the necessary amount of flour finally incorporated. She set aside the remaining, unneeded, flour, and placed the dough into the waiting wooden bread bowl, draping a dampened cloth overtop. It would require an hour at least for rising, and it must be left alone for that.

Restless now, at the thought of the needed wait, Ziva turned her attention to the mixer and the dishes she had used making the bread. Several minutes were used up in the process of cleaning off the table and her tools, putting away the mixer until the next time she needed it, washing the dough hooks, the mixing bowl, and the measuring cups by hand, drying them as well and placing them carefully back into the cupboard.

When that was accomplished, she found she still needed something to occupy her hands and her mind, too irritated and worried to be still. It was why she had started making the bread to begin with. Her guns. They could always afford another cleaning, and the methodical task was well suited to her current need for order and manual work. She collected her service weapon, her first back-up, and the two others that she kept stashed in her apartment against the need for them, as well as her gun oil, some clean cotton rags, and a rod to use on the barrels. Slowly, deliberately, she took each gun apart in turn, breaking each down into the component parts, wiping them down, checking for corrosion or loose grains of gunpowder, before putting the one back together and starting in on the next.

The ritual put her back into balance again, letting Ziva properly assess the day's events. So, she had made an error when it came to Tony. She had allowed herself to derail their argument into a series of personal attacks, and it had not been the first time in recent weeks, as she looked back upon her behavior, that she had done so. Therefore, it followed that she must be the one to make amends, to, oh what was the American phrase? To kiss and make mice? It sounded close, but it made even less sense than normal for their slang.

She placed the last gun down, and glanced over at the clock. Enough time had passed, she could go in and punch down the dough, set it for the second rising. Striding into the kitchen, she was nearly at the bread bowl when she remembered what she had been doing immediately prior. Gun oil was very useful, and necessary for the proper maintenance of her weaponry, but she doubted it would be of any help in adding to the edibility of her bread. She made a swift detour to the sink, and spent a minute carefully washing her hands, getting every last trace of oil off of her skin. Turning back to the bread bowl resting on the table, she pulled off the cloth covering, revealing a dough that had expanded up to nearly triple the size of the original lump of dough, and spent a satisfying moment punching it back down to size. Re-dampening the cloth, she again draped the bowl with it and walked out, to let the dough have its second rising, another half-hour or so before the bread would be ready to bake.

She spent the next few moments putting her guns back into their accustomed places, and then sat down upon her sofa with a sigh. Now that she was allowing herself to think about her actions, to analyze herself and her team, she knew perfectly well why this was happening. Why she was more hostile, and Tony more brittle. Why McGee had grown quieter, while Abby played her music louder than ever. Gibbs had been gone for over a month now, and they were fast approaching an anniversary that she hadn't wanted to let herself remember. In a week, it would be a year's time since she had first met the team, a year's time since first Kate Todd, then Ari Haswarii, were killed. Yartzeit, her religion, called it, the anniversary remembrance of the dead. There were other dates for her which held that terrible title, but the upcoming days were far worse, on a par with Tali's, a pain she had not thought until this past year to be equaled.

Ziva was not used to dealing with the pain of people around her. She had been trained to set her pain aside and not allow it to impact her, as had the others in Mossad. And for the main part of the past year, her current team had been too busy, and too professional, to allow the grief they still plainly felt, to come up while they worked. But for the past month, Jenny had kept the team on a slower schedule, assigning fewer cases as they adapted to the new team dynamic. The reduced pace, the approaching anniversary, and the loss of the steady support and drive that Gibbs had provided combined to put everyone on the team off-balance long enough for emotions to come forward and demand to be dealt with.

Ziva rose again from the sofa. The dough would be finished with its second rising, and now needed to be formed and baked. Striding into the kitchen, she set the oven to pre-heat as she again washed her hands before she pulled the dough out of the bread bowl and out onto the waiting baking-tray. Drawing a table-knife from the relevant drawer, she sectioned up the dough into four equal portions. With practiced skill she pulled and rolled each section into a long, thin snake, before joining the lengths together at one end. Her hands did not lose their skill as she began weaving the sections into a four-stranded braid, pinching the loose ends together at the close, and then folding the join underneath the braid at the beginning and the end.

Setting the braided bread aside for a moment, she pulled a glass and a soup-bowl out of the cupboard and placed them on the table, before retrieving an egg from the refrigerator. A moment's tapping of the egg against the edge of the cup broke the shell into two cup-shaped halves, and Ziva began the process of separating out the yolk from the white, gently tiping the yolk back and forth in the remnants of the shell, allowing the white to drain into the waiting cup. When the egg was as separated as far as it was going to, she poured the yolk into the empty bowl. Dumping the eggshell into the trash, she put the egg-white, still in its cup, up into the freezer. It would keep well there until she found a recipe requiring egg-whites. She added a splash of water into the yolk in the bowl, and, grabbing a fork from the same drawer she'd grabbed the knife out of earlier, she began to beat the yolk-and-water until the two substances had thoroughly mixed. There was a paintbrush in a jar beside the sink, one she kept carefully cleaned and used only when she was cooking. Grabbing it from the jar, she rinsed it, then used it to swab the bread with the eggwash.

As she finished that task, the oven beeped at her. It was done pre-heating, ready now to bake the bread. An easy turn, one hand holding the tray, another grasping the oven door, and the bread was gently loaded into the oven. Bumping the door closed with her hip, she leaned over to set the timer and start the baking process. One last wait before the bread was finished.

The next few minutes were dispensed with by cleaning up the last few dishes. Ziva spent the extra moments to hand-wash the soup bowl which had held the egg-wash, the soapy water gliding across ceramic a tactile comfort, smooth and sleek and fragile in her hands. The bread bowl did not require soap, rather, it just needed a damp cloth swabbed throughout its interior, to remove any remnants of dough. Her maternal grandmother had spent years patiently tutoring her in the intricacies of the kitchen, which dishes and utensils required thorough scrubbing, which ones did best when allowed to season and ripen their own flavors. The bread bowl, she had repeatedly told Ziva, was most definitely in the latter category.

Reflexively, when she finished washing up, she glanced at the clock. It only confirmed what her inner time-sense had told her, that baking the bread had indeed used up the majority of the Sunday afternoon. She had another half-hour before the bread would need to taken out of the oven. Enough time for her to walk down to the market two blocks away. Tony had a sweet tooth, and a tendency to forget to eat breakfast on Mondays. He would appreciate the fresh bread, especially if it came with that chocolate-hazelnut spread he liked so much.

He would take the implicit apology.


End file.
